[DMAudioParticipant]

Use a laptop?

[DMAudioParticipant]

I was very surprised at the sheer quality of the effects on my QU-16, and haven’t really strayed too far from the default Reverb and Delay. Depending on the room, I’ll use a little of reverb and delay on vox, and a little reverb on kick and snare.

It’s worth spending a little time at home just listening to a vocal or instrument track and going through all the effects to see the ones you like, then set them up on FX1&2. Once you’re at your venue, just mix in and fine tune to taste.

FX1 – SMR Reverberator
FX2 – 2 Tap Delay (linked)

Hope that helps.

[DMAudioParticipant]

Great response Nicola, thanks so much for taking the time to lay it all out for us.

Seems like a USB SSD drive with TRIM could be the safest solution, and with prices coming down (for the moment), we may see larger drives for larger sessions.

Hopefully the USB sticks will continue to improve, so even a bad one will still meet the transfer rates.

[DMAudioParticipant]

Interesting video, and a surprising result for sure, especially in a noisy data centre environment too!

Just for sake of clarity on what I said earlier, yes vibration can cause issues reading and writing sectors on hard drives, but the buffer should be more than capable of handling the data whilst the drive sorts itself out. In 1.4 they’ve increased the buffer size which seems to have helped some people.

Don’t get me wrong though, I haven’t had the opportunity to sit and do any testing at all on this. I’m just going off the experiences others have had, and providing my input. My reasons for scepticism on the vibration theory, are that HDDs should be more than capable of handling vibration within reason, and it doesn’t seem to be affecting those using laptops or similar using the other port. Maybe it’s the computer itself absorbing this vibration, or perhaps the casing on these external drives are just not up to the task of isolating the drive well enough from it’s environment.

In theory, if vibration is the issue, the SSD drive should be flawless even if it’s placed on top of your kick drum (not recommended!), but SSDs can have their own issues if they’re not TRIM.

Bottom line is I agree that A&H should chip in and provide some insight into the issue, given they will probably have tested it to death!

[DMAudioParticipant]

Vibration on a HDD will not cause skipping issues, that’s simply not how they work. It’s not like vinyl. Only way this could possibly happen is if the drive is of such poor design that excessive vibrations cause write failures, at which point the music is stored in the buffer and doesn’t skip. There would have to be so many write failures to overflow the buffer and cause bad data to be written, which is when you’d hear the skips.

Modern hard drives these days, you’ve have to be bouncing it off a table to cause read/write problems like that.

This is what leads me to believe that the issue that’s plaguing most people is with the Q-drive interface. Either it has tragically small buffers, or just doesn’t have the transfer rates to deal with the amount of data it’s receiving. Think of it this way….you record to the HDD on your laptop via a DAW – no issues. But with the Q-Drive, they recommend NOT starting and stopping recording, and clearing the drive after each session!

There’s definitely an inherent issue there I feel…

[DMAudioParticipant]

Cleaner way to do it would be use one of the Mix Outs. Generally speaking, not a huge amount of info is sent to the sub, so sending bass, kick, maybe even floor tom and keys to the sub using a Mix Out would be a way to do it. You could low pass everything sent to that Mix Out too.

[DMAudioParticipant]

+2

I went from Presonus to QU. Despite never having had problems with the StudioLive, there were always a few things that bugged me;

1 – When plugged into a macbook, the clock is handled by the computer not the desk
2 – The compressors don’t sound very transparent or nice
3 – Lack of direct to drive recording
4 – Motorized faders
5 – So many reports of show stopping failures during shows made me always worry about it happening to me
6 – Lack of ethernet stageboxes

It’s still an amazing desk for the money, but the QU has done everything the SL does, but a little better, and A&H is more rider friendly than Presonus in my experience.

[DMAudioParticipant]

Try this, press the Mix 5/6 button and set all channels going to Mix 5/6 to post fader. Then set all of the faders for the Mix 5/6 to 0dB….any change you make to the main FOH LR mix will be mirrored with the exception of the master LR fader. You can use the Mix 5/6 fader as your “master fader” for your IEM. Hope this helps. Jeff

This seems to be the most efficient way to do this. Any changes to the mix for FoH will be mirrored in the Mix 5/6. Personally I run 2 x mono mixes on 3 and 4. Mix 3(pre) is just the mix I need at the drum position, (goes to my left in ear), and mix 4(post) is the mirrored foh mix (goes to right in ear). I do it this way as I don’t like much in my ears whilst playing, but I can still check the mix as the night goes on.

[DMAudioParticipant]

Thanks Ron, haven’t gotten myself an iPad yet, but it’s next on the list for sure.

I knew about the fader flip of course, but I was using it from the LR RTA screen…unfortunately you can’t see whether or not it’s the left or right side frequencies without counting your button presses on the button. Not a big issue at all, and it’ll be much better using the RTA on the iPad I’m sure.

I have Audiotools on my phone, but without a measurement mic, not sure I’d even bother with SMAART.

[DMAudioParticipant]

Seems a few on here have made the shift same as I did. A&H GL, then a Presonus 16.4.2 which was great, but somehow could never trust it, and the comps were pretty horrible sounding. Now happily in my QU-16 bubble and constantly thinking, this is the desk I should have bought a year ago!

[DMAudioParticipant]

I’d like to see channel naming too, but in no rush really. There’s a lot to be said for strips of china tape like we’ve all probably done for years 😉

[DMAudioParticipant]

Have you tried reformatting the usb stick using the qu16, then dropping the quu file on again?

[DMAudioParticipant]

Glad you got it working Jaxe. Hopefully other people having similar issues will see this and it helps them too. Apparently the jittering/cut-out issue should be fixed in a future fw update by increasing the buffer size. Fingers crossed!

Like all technology, the manufacturer can only test so much. There’s no substitute for the feedback you get from end users who will find every issue there is. The real test is how A&H deal with those issues…

[DMAudioParticipant]

They never once said it works with NTFS drives, so it stands to reason that you’d need to format the drive to FAT32 first.

I appreciate you’ve had problems prodigio, but they are aware of it, and are working on it. So far my mixer has been both highly flexible and reliable.

[DMAudioParticipant]

Jaxe – I had the same problem with the 1tb Seagate Backup Plus.

The drive DOES work, but to get it to recognise properly, I had to format it as FAT32 using my pc, then format it via the QU16. Has been working great ever since. Try that with your drive and see how you get on.

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